I want to go deep.

I’m noticing a trend in my facebook postings and in what links I send to friends; a need for thoughtful conversation.

This is a long read from the Guardian, on trump’s ramshackle transition team. In the middle of it is a section on an organization trying to make young people see public service as an exciting choice.

There were hundreds of fantastically important success stories in the US government. They just never got told.

Stier knew an astonishing number of them. He had detected a pattern: a surprising number of the people responsible for them were first-generation Americans who had come from places without well-functioning governments. People who had lived without government were more likely to find meaning in it. On the other hand, people who had never experienced a collapsed state were slow to appreciate a state that had not yet collapsed.

You might know, but probably not, that I got support from TRIO while I was in college.I also participated in the McNair program, and even though I didn’t go on for higher degrees, I still think it was one of the more important things I did at college. And now this thought peters out, because I have no idea where to go, except that you should maybe watch where people who didn’t grow up with the fairly common privileges.

ProPublica has an article up: “I don’t want to shoot you, brother.” An officer is fired because he didn’t immediately shoot somebody that he thought was trying suicide by cop. The article contained information on how police departments train officers on the use of deadly force, and what arguments could be made both for and against shooting.

A Native kid was shot up here last year by a county cop, maybe suicide, maybe not. At the time, there was outrage and calls for investigation into racism in the department, and questions regarding the county sheriff and the veracity of the autopsy.  Reading the ProPublica article made me realize how little I know about police procedures, and how this information would be useful to citizens. Watching the vote verification for the midterms this year, I noticed that even though there was no one running against him (no penalty against him for not marking that oval on the ballot), he got a consistent share of the vote in all communities, including communities that I think have large Native populations.

And then there was the strange case of Ammon Bundy, who came out criticizing Trumpism for greed and cruelty and fear over the horror being enacted on the Mexico border.

I dunno. Time to sit and listen.

Cat, who demands that I make the bed the way she wants it.

 

When I was young.

Among other things I did that were “young,” followed by “and stupid,” I memorized The Second Coming by Yeats. Little did I know that it would be the theme song for most of my life.

Maybe it just is the way people are. But we could be better. (Don’t worry, Xmas is coming and I’ll be all full of Dickens.)

Sweet dreams, eh?

 

Things.

Al the noise in the world, Robert Mueller, Lindsey Graham, Paul Ryan actually not being an absolute toady, frauds and conspiracies and ridiculous displays of force and of course the ever-present frisson of nuclear war –

Drumpf has to stay president possibly till he dies, so he can not be prosecuted (even though I’m pretty darn sure that he can be impeached and imprisoned for something, because where there’s this much slime there’s rot). I’m willing to bet that if push came to shove he’d throw Princess I-I-Me right under the damn bus, and then complain that the Fake News and the Jewish Soros conspiracy made him do it. Tiffany should be happy that she’s largely forgotten.

Fuck all that. The sun was out for an hour this morning, and again this evening. Full-on glory.

And a sliver of moon.

(No retouching – this drew me out the front door in my pajamas. I’m sure the neighbors will miss me.)

Ack.

The only reason to do this in a bathroom is to make sure nobody ever uses it.

 

Especially this.

I found another one:

This is . . . ack. And these aren’t anywhere near bad

I don’t much care for subway tiles, either. Or not-quite-almost-black paint.

Difference between Ford and Kavanaugh.

It’s small, but here’s what you need to know: Ford’s on the left, Kavanaugh’s on the right. Blue line? Question answered directly. Red line? Evasion.

Here’s the original article, with an expandable version of the chart.

 

Look at other things.

Saw this on fb this morning:

František Kupka, The Yellow Scale.” Do you see “Portrait of Adelle Bloch-Bauer”? I do.

I did a google search for images, and found this –

“Mme. Kupka Among Verticals.”

Kupka lived 1841-1957. If you google him, you’ll see him working through many schools, including Synchromist and the early moden era expressionism. One more –

“Printemps Cosmique”.

Remember when we used to warn people of an image-heavy blog post? So long ago.

Also, fuck. Rosenstein just resigned.

Seasonal affective disorder.

There’s a place in me where dry leaves race across pavement out on the edges of the streetlight, where the world is made of noise, wind blowing and branches waving and the moon gasps out between clouds. Tomorrow will be three minutes and change shorter than today. If you think of heading down to the marina to see the sunset at 7:40, you’re already too late. It’s getting dark.

Don’t talk to me about D3. I’m taking shit-tons, and it’s doing a world of good, except for maybe making me wired a little hot. Being out in the sun might help. Going to the gym might help. Stay low, stay out of sight, out towards the edges, keep a low profile. I don’t think I’m good company right now. I don’t trust myself in company right now.

Right now, this minute, I’m trying to wrap my giant chess-club brain around it, hold this mood like a tool. What can I use it for? Maybe it’s nothing, maybe I just have too wild an imagination. Maybe this is just habit.

Or maybe it’s fall.

 

 

 

Something you should read.

It’s a Twitter thread by Will Bunch, on . . . fighting the good fight. On what was on the tv the year after the Summer of Love. On Bobbie Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, and wondering if the cops and the guns were going to come after you, or maybe me.

Maybe this is the start of the big division. Or maybe just when it got so visible.

The whole world is still watching.

About Daughter.

Or actually, why doesn’t she do this one thing that I must do (about every 6 months)?

Mercury is about to go forward again, and all the weirdness Must. Stop. Please. This retrograde has been soooo rough.

I’m at work, behind the counter, a space less than three feet wide, and maybe five deep. A fellow employee is standing next to me, trying to print something on the printer whose paper feed through the drawer has failed, so you have to hand-feed it one sheet at a time. Bent over, because the thing has a short cord and you can’t pull it out to get to it. This fellow employee had chastised me yesterday for getting so angry with the damn thing, and so when he yelled out FUCK I laughed and said, “customers, dear.” So he’s there, and he’s a big guy, and he comes with a dog, whose favorite place is behind the counter anyway, and Must be there with Master.

I managed to put one of the phone lines at work on conference call, yesterday, apparently to a black hole or something, because it was dead silent. I’m trying to get the conference call to end, when another person comes in and want to use the upstairs printer, which now requires a specific combination of chants and burnt offerings to work. She can’t get it to work, it’s yelling at her, so I switch problems with her: she can look at the phone, and I’ll perform the ritual sacrifice necessary for the printer. I solve her problem and come back downstairs – and am met with SCRREEEEEEECHHHH. One or both of us had our phone on speaker, with the dead space of the conference call.

I didn’t know you could get feedback from a cordless phone.

So she’s doing her thing, he’s done with his thing, and I’m left with the unending conference call. When all else fails, unplug things, right? I chicken out on pulling the power cord, and opt for unplugging the phone line. I wait about ten seconds, and plug it back in. It’s still saying conference call. We’ve got two lines, so I just wander off and forget about it –

For four hours, at which point it occurs to me we haven’t had any phone calls. Oops hahaha. So I plug the phone line into the right jack. We have dial tone! And the conference call has ended.

Anyway It’s been rough, and I’ve been good, rolling along for the most part. We won’t talk about seriously considering ramming my car repeatedly into the gas pump that decided I was not allowed to get gas until I went in and got the guy and he came out and “hey everything’s fine!” (I think it was a solid couple of hours before I left that train of thought. Would it have been worth going to prison for a few years? Maybe.)

So actually, today was . . . better, easing up on the two steps forward 13 back climb the ladder jump across the abyss outrun the tiger mode. I come home, have dinner, mope and sulk till I run across an Adele song, and then as long as I’m at youtube, a couple more songs, then omg Fleetwood Mac’s Chain* turn it up and squeeze the headphones tight so the drum is pounding in the middle of your skull!

And I realize Daughter doesn’t do that. To the best of my knowledge. Maybe she has better headphones. Or maybe she does it when I’m not home, considering the number of times I’ve yelled at her about her headphone volume.

Or maybe she doesn’t have Mercury retrogrades in her world.

*You don’t have to listen to Fleetwood Mac. I won’t judge. Pick your own.

 

Standing on shoulders.

Left, van Gogh, 1886.        Right, that spanish ghoul, 1907.

I dunno. Is it just that the human body can only adopt a finite series of poses (without going to extremes), or what? And also, with van Gogh’s model looking down we get a sense of innocence (read naked) as opposed to ghoul guy’s fear and despair (nude, under duress).

I suppose I should research the ghoul more, so that I can use facts instead of the gut feeling that he was a creepy fucker. I could also think more on naked/nude women in art.

There’s a line in The Dispossessed by Le Guin, where the hero talks about all the sexy curved lines in the spaceship, with no women on board. He says something like “they put their women into their furniture.” In The Creative Will, by Wright, talks about women being capable only of surface decoration, while men were about construction.

I might be subconsciously researching that one.